As surely as little boys on sleds follow the first snowfall, the departure of Mary Schapiro as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission has occasioned one fawning encomium after another from the press.

“It’s not a stretch to say she has saved the regulatory body from irrelevance, if not outright extinction, and she has rebuilt it into a powerful presence on Wall Street,” wrote Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.

The New York Times’s business section carried an homage to Schapiro, along with the requisite photograph of her looking off into the middle distance, pensively, as the late-afternoon sun flooded an SEC conference room. “As her bruising tenure comes to an end,” the article said, she “leaves behind a stronger S.E.C., an overhaul characterized by her attention to detail and meticulous preparation.”

I understand the time-honored ritual of praising a departing public servant for his or her selflessness in passing up millions of dollars in the private sector to take on the thankless task of heading up a powerful government agency. But enough already.